personal opinions and thoughts

Six months at Thomson Reuters

It’s unbelievable how fast the time goes by. It was only in January that I started my new role of Lead Software Engineer at Thomson Reuters, and here we are six months later. Lots of things have happened during those two quarters, and I feel I really grew a lot professionally. I am part of a new team charged with revitalization of TR’s data feed architecture. I live and breathe C++14 and low-latency is my middle name 😉Thomson Reuters is a much different place than any of my previous gigs. It’s a large, mature company with thousands of well-known clients. Oftentimes I need to interface with our developers in St Louis, Beijing and Hong Kong, sometimes at ungodly times of the day. Good organization is key. Our code is also well designed. I must admit this is the first time that I was forced to write extensive unit tests. It took some time to get used to, but now I really appreciate them. It’s much quicker to find obvious behavior bugs accidentally introduced by code changes. I cannot believe I’ve gone so many years without proper unit test coverage.

Despite Reuters’ size, I feel like I have a lot of power to innovate on my and cross teams. This was something I feared I’d lose in a large firm, but thankfully I was proven wrong. There is plenty of autonomy.

And finally – the people. I am lucky to be surrounded by lots of smart, kind people who are a pleasure to work and hang out with. I’m learning tons of new stuff, which is a definite plus. Let’s keep this thing going! 🙂